Sermon Tone Analysis

Your Best Life Now

Ha-Foke Bah Hebrew

Ha-Foke Bah English

What brings true meaning to your life?

The kind of meaning that satisfies you emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually.

Meaning that leaves you shaking your head and feeling like no matter how hard you just worked on this thing, you feel privileged that you got to do it.

It was the way I felt when I helped build a habitat for humanity home.

It was back-breaking for someone like me with very little construction background.

Yet, when the house was complete.

When the new owners took the keys all I could remember thinking was, “the reward far outweighed the effort put in.”

What was the reward?

Only the satisfaction of seeing a single mom with her two kids open the door to their brand new home and new life.

What brings true meaning to your life?

If I were to ask you, “Is there something more meaningful than the happiness that success gives?”

Whatever success looks like to you.

Now, most people will say “yes” because they know the right answer is “of, course success is not the key to real meaning in life”

The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have a beautiful saying, “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”

And our muscles, what we do, indicate we still think success is the key to meaning in life.

We are working more than ever before.

Statistics Slide

In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.

According to the International Labor Organization, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”

I’m not telling you to work less hours.

You may have very little choice in the matter.

And, you are more than entitled to spend all of your waking hours plugging away.

But what these numbers show us is that as a country, we primarily derive meaning from the successes we can obtain from our work.

So we work more.

Yet, more work leads to more stress and a lower quality of life.

And that feeling of real meaning that gives satisfaction is never really obtained because there is always the next raise, the next project and the rat race continues.

Others have said we need to swap the equation that happiness is the key to meaning.

Get happy then you will have meaning and then you will be successful.

So now, people are using happiness like a Trojan horse to achieve success.

I know this because the current trend in leadership books is books on leading from your “happy place.”

Amazon shows at least 3,000 results in Self-Help books alone in the last 90 days related to the topic of Happiness.

Shawn Achor’s talk on TEDex called “the happy secret to better work has 19, 554, 498 views.

If all the views of this one Ted talk represented the people on a newly formed country they would be the 59th largest country in the world out of 233.

Having a population higher than Romania and just a little lower than Australia.

Has the pursuit of happiness brought meaning to life?

The hard answer is “no.”

Statistics Graph

Despite America having a strong economy, 2.9 GDP this last quarter, lower unemployment, better trade with our foreign competitors, Suicide related deaths remain the 10th leading cause of death in the United States.

There are an average of 129 suicides every day in our country and 70% of those roughly 90 of them will be men in their 40s-50s.

And Heart Disease related deaths, the number 1 killer of people in the United States, is often times associated with either old age or chronic stress.

Researchers are trying to discover if strews is the cause or if stress leads to doing things that cause heart disease.

In other words, stress sets off a chain reaction of events like drinking too much, smoking, a hurry up and go lifestyle, over-eating, poor eating, lack of sleep that causes the heart rate to rise, blood pressure to go up and creates the perfect storm for a stroke or heart attack.

Yet, we are doing all of this in pursuit of happiness that will lead to success or success that leads to happiness.

The numbers don’t lie, we are not happier, we are not healthier as a society and real meaning remains allusive.

One of my favorite offerings or actually a counter offering to the Happiness self-help books is this one by Oscar the Grouch.

“When opportunity comes knocking.

I pretend I am not home.”

Have you ever heard that when you are at your happiest you are the most willing to take risks?

This can be a good thing for creative and innovative thinking.

However, it can also create a kind of “superman” thinking that leads to incredibly foolish risk taking on the other side of tremendous happiness.

I have seen people and you probably know people who are constantly caught up in this cycle of trying to get happiness, getting happy, doing something stupid, feeling tons of regret, wondering why happiness seems like a temporary visitor and not a long-term guest.

Answer, happiness is leading to risk taking behavior in the wrong direction.

I want to propose that real meaning in life is not caused by happiness or success but by effective altruism.

I wish I could take credit for coming up with this concept or its name but I can’t.

I first saw effective altruism in the Bible when Abraham went to rescue his estranged nephew Lot in Genesis 14.

And, i first heard Peter Singer use this term in 2013.

Effective altruism simple means thoughtfully doing something or supporting a something that bring about the greatest positive impact, based upon your values.

Effective altruism - when we are doing our best for others, we are living our best possible life.

Interestingly enough, the Harvard Business School, has release a paper where they are able to demonstrate through scientific data that effective altruism “causes increased happiness, and that happy people are giving people and that these two relationships may operate in a circular fashion.”

Through fMRI technology, we now know that effective altruism activates the same parts of the brain that are stimulated by rich food and martial hanky-panky.

Here is what this means, science shows that our bodies are hard wired to derive maximum pleasure from altruism.

Helping others is not just a charitable thing, it may just be the secret to living a life that is not only happier, more successful but also healthier, wealthier, more productive, and meaningful.

I have said this so much to you here at Beth El Shalom you can guess what I am going to say next, “Science is always just catching up to the Bible.”

We are living our best possible life when we are doing our best for others.

I believe the Bible was given not as a book of “do’s” and “dont’s.”

It is so much better than that.

I believe the Word of God was given to us so that we could create the best possible world and live the best, most meaningful, happy lives imaginable.

Long before fMRI scans, long before “effective altruism” was coined as term we had Deuteronomy that said.

Deuteronomy 14:22-23

On the surface this looks like the opposite of altruism.

This looks like you are supposed to save your tithe, to spend it on a big festive meal in Jerusalem for religious education purposes.

This does not look like effective altruism but effective savings for vacationing.

The next couple of passages seem to enforce this notion:

Deuteronomy 14:24-26

The context of this passage is one of Israel’s three pilgrimage festivals: passover, shavuot and sukkot.

They would go to the Tabernacle or the Temple that is the “place” where God caused his name to dwell.

These were spiritual journals and not carnal parties.

Yet, this passage seems to encourage personal indulgence not an other focus.

Only perhaps that you might invest in the local Jerusalem market place economy through your purchases.

By the first century this is no doubt what people were thinking and that is why Yeshua drove out the money tables.

But the passage does have more to say, and this is where the effective altruism comes in because before you could leave on this festival to use your tithe it says:

Deuteronomy 14:27 But you are not to neglect the Levite within your gates, for he has no portion or inheritance with you.

Levites were not owners of land, they were stewards of the Tabernacle and teachers of the Law of God.

Other tribes were given the gift of land tracks, farms, vineyards, ranching grounds but the Levites had none of this.

They could not pass on tracks of land, ranches, vineyards to their children.

They could only pass on them an ongoing stewardship.

Levites lived in every city in Israel.

They were spread out among their brothers.

The word “neglect” here is a decent word choice for the Hebrew word “Azav.”

So long as we understand “neglect” as a verb the implies a very real choice to fail to care for something properly.

Not in the sense of I “neglected” to pay my light bill because I got busy and did not have it set up on auto draft.

This is neglect in the sense of I neglected to pay my light bill because I wanted to use that money to go to an Astros game.

It might be better to turn the Hebrew verb into strongest possible sense, “You are not to apostatize(Heb.

Azav) by choosing to not care for the levite properly who lives near you.”

Or if I was to state the command in the positive, which I like to do, “you are to practice effective altruism to the Levite in your neighborhood.”

This is much closer to how they would have heard this sentence.

It would have put the breaks on the “tithe-party for me and my family mentality in Jerusalem.”